After a much-mentioned article by Jakob Nielsen, “mega menus” became all the rage, but there are some serious issues to consider before diving in. The can create serious usability issues and negatively impact your site information architecture and, ultimately how you are found, ranked and categorized by the search engines.

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Mega menus have been heralded as a usability enhancement, but they can also result in serious usability challenges. It’s not a simple yes or no. It’s quite easy to end up with navigation that is difficult, occasionally impossible, for the user to actually navigate.

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A minor usability problem on an after-purchase survey leaves your correspondant less than happy. And that’s bad for the merchant. So a shopping experience that was a 9 or 10 out of 10, remains so, but the good feeling for the merchant is subtly damaged by poor interface design on the part of the third-party customer survey service they use. A shame.

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No, that title isn’t a typo. It’s a sarcastic comment on the “genius” of the login screen for the iTunes Genius feature which, as it turns out, is the same as the iTunes store login. It took me four tries to figure out how to log in.

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Short version: create a label (like ‘aaDelete’), enable keyboard shortcuts, use ‘l’, then label the message aaDelete, then ‘k’ to go to the next message. When you’re all done, select all messages labelled delete and then delete them. It’s sort of like a second Trash can since Google won’t make the first one work right.

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By default Firefox comes with a popup blocker enabled that prevents popups from automatically opening, that is the ones that you don’t specifically request, but that open just because you visit a page. So that’s fine. That problem is solved. What is more annoying is legitimate popups that are actually useful, but which are very [...]

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